Empathy training

Andrés Fontalba
 

Communication is the most important skill for healthcare professionals. Efficient communication occurs when the therapist feels sure that he or she has listened to and registered the user's needs and, thanks to this, can provide personalized attention. Empathy is the ability to perceive, understand and share the feelings, thoughts and emotions of others, based on the recognition of the other as a person similar to ourselves, with a mind of their own. Both parties benefit from this empathy, and patients who experience empathy during their treatment obtain better results and greater chances of recovery. In turn, professionals with higher levels of empathy work more efficiently and productively and express greater satisfaction with their professional development.

There is a broad consensus on the benefits of empathy and, simultaneously, on how our way of behaving and communicating seriously hinders it. Almost 70% of professionals have stated that they encounter these barriers. Often, professionals and patients have very different points of view about their communication skills. A specific communication can be self-perceived as satisfactory by one of the parties, while the other feels neither heard nor understood, seeming as if the two protagonists had been in two completely different conversations. The reasons can be many, the most documented being the high demand for care, the lack of time, the therapeutic approach, the lack of training in these skills and the differences in socio-economic conversations. If, in addition, in the current situation, we add care pressure, anxiety, lack of self-awareness and lack of adequate training, these elements additionally hinder the development of empathy and many opportunities to use it are missed.

Among all these factors, education and training are modifiable. Each day brings more evidence that supports the need to continuously work on these communication skills. It has been shown that the acquisition of communication skills contributes greatly to the improvement of the therapeutic relationship. Professionals who complete this training are more likely to detect the emotions and evolution of patients and, therefore, to explore and satisfy their needs. Education can be given through practical work, virtual supports, role-playing and experiential learning. The most successful models seek to improve in professionals the skills of detecting subtle non-verbal signs of emotions, in themselves and in their patients, which enable them to offer a supportive response and facilitate the resolution of conflicts that may appear in the communication.

Given the current challenges, it is time to strengthen and promote this type of program, to implement them in a standardized and generalized way, and for training related to empathy and compassion to be incorporated into all training itineraries and routine clinical practice.